[ubuntu-uk] Bare Metal virtualization on older Xeon hardware

[Rob Beard]

On 04/06/10 23:59, Kris Douglas wrote:
> On 4 June 2010 19:28, Rob Beard<rob at esdelle.co.uk>  wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> At work we're looking at server virtualization, both to give us a bit
>> more redundancy against hardware failure and also to try and cut down on
>> our power requirements a bit by getting shot of some older servers (P3,
>> early P4's).
>>
>> Now we already have two IBM x Series servers which are going on about 4
>> years old.  The idea is to maybe replace these with something a bit
>> newer and then re-use them for less mission critical uses.
>>
>> These servers have the old P4 based Xeons in them running at 3GHz.
>> According to Intel's web site they don't support Intel-VT technology but
>> they are 64-Bit capable (IIRC they support EM64T).  In the past I've
>> played around with VMWare Server running on top of Linux (and Windows),
>> in fact at home I have it running happy on my server with a couple of
>> VM's chugging away.
>>
>> What I'd like to do though is use some bare metal virtualization.  I
>> gather the newer virtualization software such as Microsoft Hyper-V,
>> VMWare ESXi and KVM all require Intel-VT technology or AMD-V.  I
>> wondered if anyone knew of any bare metal virtualization software that
>> supports the older CPUs?
>>
>> I'm pretty certain an older version of ESXi did although when I last
>> tried it a couple of years back it didn't support the hardware I tried
>> it on (a bog standard Phenom X4 desktop PC).  I can't for the life of me
>> find a download link for the older ESXi software (which I believe VMWare
>> were starting to give away).
>>
>> So before I give up, does anyone know of anything that would be suitable
>> which doesn't require Intel-VT or AMD-V?
>>
>
> Hello there, we have also just switched to virtualization, and we are
> using Citrix XenServer, it's free. We were running on a Dell PowerEdge
> 750, which uses an old 2.4 dualcore Xeon chip. I would have a look at
> that, it is really quite fantastic, and I think it runs on any chip,
> but for Windows, you need the hardware virtualization. I know
> Virtualbox will run anything on anything, so that's also worth a try.
>
> Feel free to give me a bell for any info.
>
> HTH,
> Kris Douglas,
>

Thanks Chris,

I'll check Xen out, it's been a while since I last looked at it.  Long 
term I'm hoping to get a couple of new servers (an extended warranty for 
out existing servers is pretty pricey and the performance increase we'd 
get from a newer server would be useful).

Rob